ROSE PARADE IS GREAT EXAMPLE OF FLOWER POWER

Building a float for the Tournament of Roses requires creativity, patience, engineering know-how and enthusiasm for the work. And glue by the gallon, welding torches, saws, seeds, farina, seaweed, blenders and laundry mangles.

A tour of a few float barns in Azusa, Pasadena and Burbank, Calif., in mid-December is a full sensory experience, well before the fresh flowers arrive for application on 50 floats in a six-day frenzy leading up to New Year's Day.

At Festival Artists in Azusa, where construction of floats for Disney's California Adventure park and China Airlines is under way, there are scents of sawdust and hot metal and a damp chill in the air. The intermittent roar of welders' torches and power saws competes with ranchero music.

The float promoting California Adventure's upcoming Twilight Zone Tower of Terror attraction, titled "A Sudden Drop in Pitch," is being assembled in three stages -- one with the tower and its plummeting elevator; another with the park's roller coaster, Golden Gate Bridge replica and Ferris wheel; and a lightning bolt for the top that cannot be attached until later -- because it is simply too massive for the hangar-size warehouse.

"They wanted the tallest float in the history of the parade," Festival owner Craig Bugajski said. So he outdid his 86-foot bungee tower for Nestle in 1993 with a 100-foot tower atop two 55-foot wagons. The float, on this day a partially painted steel and plywood shell, will on parade day have a finished weight of 75,000 pounds and will fold down to 17 feet in height to clear the Sierra Madre overpass.

The Tournament of Roses float business certainly has come a long way from the blossom-festooned carriages of 1890 or even the first spectacular of the floats in 1908. In 1895, the Tournament of Roses Association was formed and was fairly pleased with itself for having raised $595 toward costs of the 1896 parade, now a multimillion-dollar international extravaganza. The first commercial sponsors did not enter floats until 1935, but now they budget years in advance for the expense. Some sponsors already have signed deals for their 2005 floats.

Phoenix Decorating in Pasadena has 23 floats under construction in its Rose Palace building. Volunteer tour guides walk groups through the Palace, describing the process: The vintage mangle machines are great for flattening dried corn husks, pampas grass makes good animal fur, and skin tones on the human figures are made from a combination of sifted farina and corn meal with chili powder or strawberry powder for a little glow.

Bill Lofthouse, owner of Phoenix and now working on his 48th parade, said float budgets can range from $75,000 for a small (35-foot) float with minimal animation to $300,000 for a major effort.

His daughter Michelle's design for Honda, a steam-puffing, cymbal-clanging calliope titled "Parade Wagon," will lead this year's parade, which has the theme "Music, Music, Music."

Five or six figures may seem like a huge outlay in a year of high unemployment and corporate belt-tightening, but it's impossible to estimate the value of such feel-good exposure to a million people on the parade sidelines, tens of millions more watching at home and countless others reading about it later in newspapers.